Over the last decade we have been involved in a dozen public planning inquiries over towers of luxury housing stretching from Blackfriars to Battersea. Design is considered, the impact on heritage and views, daylight and shadowing, wind, parking, traffic generation, sustainability – everything except the need for yet another tower of luxury housing (The great London property squeeze, The long read, 25 May).
Whitehall rewards councils that meet their housing targets, and planning permission for 800 luxury flats on the South Bank means targets are met for another year – never mind that they will be unaffordable to Londoners. Meanwhile housebuilders landbank, sitting on planning permissions for over 600,000 new homes in the UK, pushing land prices inexorably upwards.
The problem is structural. The richest 1% own 50% of the world’s capital, and they need to invest it in something. Property in global cities gives the biggest returns. Politicians and decision makers revel in the bling of it all.
A simple decade-long moratorium on private housebuilding would bankrupt housebuilders, scare off the capital, and collapse the price of land, allowing councils and social housing providers to purchase land and build homes that Londoners desperately need.
Michael Ball
Waterloo Community Development Group, London
• Imagine, if you will, a UK in which everyone is satisfactorily housed; where there is a sufficient number of good-quality houses where they are needed; where all can afford their rent or mortgage without resort to state subsidy and that this appears to be a stable situation for the foreseeable future. Then think about the processes that may have led to this state of affairs. Proceed to consider those who will have lost money, considerable amounts of money, as a result – and guess where their political sympathies lie and how much clout they could wield. Then estimate, in the present circumstances, the possibilities of all in the UK being satisfactorily housed in the foreseeable future. I find the conclusions inescapable. There are those in this country who require a permanent homeless population to ensure their financial income, and they will fight to maintain it.
Philip Platt
Abergele, Conwy
• George Monbiot hits the nail on the head (Spend more money on the public space – for all our sakes, 31 May) by demonstrating that our public spaces are unnecessarily suffering cuts and neglect despite the abundance of wealth in our society. Earlier this month it was revealed that the wealth of the UK’s richest 1,000 people rose 14% last year to £658bn. And yet, as the communities and local government select committee recognised in its public parks report in February, the UK’s 27,000 public parks are being plunged into crisis due to chronic underfunding, and are facing even further cuts.
Those MPs called for immediate action at all levels, and noted that many, including the Friends of Parks groups movement who we represent and 322,000 petitioners to the committee, are demanding the management of parks become a properly funded statutory service. In our submission to the committee we estimated this would cost £2bn-£3bn annually, a tiny fraction of the ever-increasing wealth of the super-rich, which could be easily collected via traditional taxation. We urge all political parties to back this call.
Dave Morris
Chair, National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces, London
• George Monbiot is right to argue for tackling the gross waste of natural resources from the way we use land. An obvious alternative is to share the uplift in land values from development, a principle that even our Treasury accepts. But even more important is to start raising more finance to local infrastructure from those who own most residential property. This would not only help secure a more equal and less wasteful society, but would also encourage those with underoccupied houses and over-large gardens to move to somewhere more manageable. A local infrastructure funding trust would provide a better mechanism than national taxation. It would make use of a long-overdue reassessment of our anachronistic property taxation system that enables landowners to increase the value of their assets without either risk or effort.
Dr Nicholas Falk
The Urbed Trust
• The recent redevelopment of the area around the main Cambridge railway station is a perfect illustration of George Monbiot’s case. Access of passengers to the expanded station has been restricted in favour of new shops, offices, bars, expensive flats and a luxury hotel. The taxi rank has to wriggle into the car park, which has shrunk, as have the number of short-stay parking places. Motorists trying to reach the station have to thread their way through a narrow street sandwiched between huge buildings to a hopelessly congested dropping-off point. There is, to be sure, a multi-storey bicycle park. But such was the greed of the developers that they did not allow space for cycle lanes to reach it. The entire reconstruction is a shameful instance of the sacrifice of public interest to private profit.
Dr Piers Brendon
Cambridge
• The previous government’s plans to radically change the way supported housing is funded set off serious alarm bells among the non-profit organisations working with the people who rely on these services.
For many – including older people in sheltered housing, people with a learning disability and those who are homeless, living with a mental illness, fleeing domestic violence or have been in contact with criminal justice system – supported housing services provide a lifeline, a safe place to call home.
The proposed cap on their housing benefit, at the same rate as people in the cheapest privately rented accommodation, would mean that most people in this type of housing would need a top-up from their local authority to fund this crucial help. A recent joint select committee report may help the next government to find a better way to fund this system. The report states that the top-up mechanism should only be used as an exception, as leaving people reliant on overstretched local authorities will cause instability and uncertainty.
We need a funding system that pays for the higher cost of these housing services and meets the needs of the people who rely on them. We urge the next government to rethink these reforms and ensure supported housing can continue to provide people with a safe place to live and call home.
Mark Winstanley Chief executive, Rethink Mental Illness
Liz Bates Chief executive, Deafblind UK
Tim Cooper Chief executive, United Response
Anne Fox Chief executive, Clinks
Rick Henderson Chief executive, Homeless Link
Neil Heslop Chief executive, Leonard Cheshire Disability
Vicky McDermott Chief executive, Papworth Trust
Polly Neate Chief executive, Women’s Aid
David Orr Chief executive, National Housing Federation
Jacob Tas Chief executive, Nacro
Janine Tregelles Chief executive, Mencap
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
